Two Dissertations · §675 · John Davenant

Cap. IX Arg. 14 (Corvinus): our sentence overturns religion's foundation two ways — precise election without obedience-intuit loves men more than justice and kills all religious solicitude

That assumed, they try to show our view overturns religion's foundation in two ways. First: it sets God as having precisely elected some to salvation without any gaze upon obedience — from which it follows that God loved those men more than his own justice. That granted, the necessity of rendering obedience is taken away, and all care about religion.

Latin

Hoc posito conantur ostendere sententiam nostram hoc fundamentum religionis duplici modo evertere. Primo, quia statuit Deum sine ullius obedientiae intuitu aliquos praecise ad salutem elegisse: unde sequitur, Deum illos homines magis amasse quam justitiam suam: Quo posito, tollitur obedientiae praestandae necessitas omnisque de religione solicitudo.

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John Davenant argues from Scripture that Christ's death is a remedy offered to every person, so that anyone who hears the Gospel may be called to believe, and then opens a second dissertation on predestination.

John Davenant (1572–1641) was Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, bishop of Salisbury from 1621, and England's leading delegate to the Synod of Dort. A Reformed theologian of the moderate school, he defended universal atonement language within a Calvinist frame.

The Two Dissertations (1650) press two theses: that Christ died sufficiently for all, and that God sincerely calls all who hear the gospel — against the novel claim that Christ died only for the elect in every sense. They are Davenant's mature statement of the hypothetical-universalist position that divided English Calvinists.

This volume covers the opening of the first dissertation through the close of chapter 3, with the theses on the extent of Christ's death.

Date1572–1641 AD (Bishop of Salisbury; 1650 Cambridge imprint)

The 1683 reprint was not used as base text. No modern English was copied.

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